


i guess you could say i’ve a call

by endquestionmark



Category: Oxenfree
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-10-07 11:21:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10359309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: The lanterns of Clarissa’s eyes, like some dreadful deep-sea fish, the salt and rust that Alex can taste in the air, the cadence of her voice like Morse code from a long-dead transmitter: Alex is suddenly desperately sad, both that she doesn’t understand and that she doesn’t know how to try. The two of them are stranded on opposite sides of an unbridgeable chasm with only the rattle of each other’s radio static for company, and all Alex can do is lie there and meet Clarissa’s deadlight stare, untold fathoms bearing down on them both.





	

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, this is pretty much straight-up eldritch body horror porn with accompanying probable consent issues, so proceed accordingly. Second of all, this contains spoilers for at least one ending of Oxenfree with some references to the epilogue. Third and most importantly of all, in place of the usual attribution and blame, you know who you fucking are.

Alex is working in a coffeeshop when a dead girl comes in.

The entire thing requires more than a little qualification, of course. Alex isn’t actually working at the coffeeshop, just taking up bar space with her laptop and a multiplying population of takeout cups as she goes through Craiglist’s talent gigs section, and it isn’t actually Clarissa. Alex just thinks it is for a second, something about the tone of the girl’s voice and the way she tosses her head, flicking her hair out of her face as if she hates making a big deal out of it.

New York is full of people who look like they hate to make a big deal out of whatever they’re currently having the time of their lives blowing out of proportion, and some fraction of that population has to be redheads, logically, and it’s been years. Alex shouldn’t still be expecting Clarissa to walk through the door any moment, trailing smoke and looking at Alex like she wishes she could wipe her out of existence. _See? Irony,_ Alex thinks, and clicks through to the next page of poorly disguised adult listings. She’s getting better at living with what she did. Some days, she barely thinks about it at all.

Honestly, she doesn’t even know if Clarissa is dead. She doesn’t know if there’s a word for what Clarissa is; lost, maybe. Clarissa, of course, would have known. Is she dead if she never existed at all? Sometimes Alex tries to remember why she begged Michael to take her on that last trip to the lake, and it’s like seeing double until she remembers. Nobody else seems to have a problem with the logic there, but then nobody else really wants to talk about it. It’s partly a kind of awful politeness, because they don’t know how to say: _So, how do you live with it?_

Clarissa wouldn’t have been polite. She would have just asked. _Truth or slap, Alex_ , and she wouldn’t have been happy with the answer either way.

Michael never got to move to New York, so Alex had decided she would do it for him. She accepted a college offer from a school with enough majors that she didn’t have to pick one until her third year, and then her advisor sat her down and said, _so it doesn’t look like you’ve really focused on anything,_ and that was true. Alex had spent three years taking classes at more or less random, because the professors had cool names or because they made a neat pattern on the weekly schedule layout, and so in the end she had scraped together enough 300-level classes to graduate with a patchwork major that even she doesn’t fully understand. Her advisor said it would be a good degree to have if she ever decided to do grad school, which Alex had understood even then as a kind way of saying that she would have to get her own shit together for once.

Anyway, Alex walked at graduation and threw her hat in the air and left her robes in a subway station trash can, and then she spent the next two months staring at the wall as the temperature ratcheted up into the nineties, the hundreds, and the humidity set in to stay. Hence the coffeeshop: if Alex is going to spend her time staring at the wall and emailing endless resumés into the abyss, she may as well change up the scenery occasionally.

She has a plan, kind of, and enough savings to make rent until the end of the year. The plan is to email the kind of bands that list their open positions on Craigslist until one of them agrees to give her a shot as a vocalist, or until she runs out of bands, because what Alex never told anybody — not even Michael — was that it seemed like being part of shows was the only thing better than seeing them, and that’s all Alex knows how to do. The savings are from working a string of under-the-table customer service jobs in school, which is why Alex has the growing collection of empty coffee cups. She knows better than to take up bar space without paying rent in an appropriate currency. What she doesn’t know is how to make friends anymore, because there’s just too much to find out about her, too much explanation that would go into any conversation like: _So why did you move all the way across the country for college?_ Or: _So why don’t you ever come out with us?_ Or: _So tell me about yourself._

So instead of getting to know people and going out with them and spending money, Alex spent college working jobs that left her no time to figure out what to do next. The more Alex thinks about it, the more ironic it seems that she’s in a better place than most of her classmates in terms of stability but has absolutely no idea what to do with it. The future just keeps coming for everybody but her.

She hasn’t thought about Clarissa in a while, which is to say the last week. Alex tries to remember Clarissa as she was, because it seems like the least she can do, but Clarissa was never really good with people. She was always sharp, in the same way that Alex gets when she’s really stressed and snaps at everybody, and she was prone to tactless honesty at the worst possible times, and then afterwards she was so angry, all the time. Alex gets it a little more now, because she thinks that Clarissa must have seen her life stretching out ahead of her like a carnival ride, bigger than grades and finals and college letters, and then the lights must have come down — the power switched off, the tracks left to rust, weeds pushing up between the ties — and then it was gone, before she even had a chance to try.

Alex doesn’t get angry the same way Clarissa did, because she doesn’t know how to, just one more way she feels like a prop, a stand-in for somebody who couldn’t make it today, the understudy for a part she’s never rehearsed. She wonders if she would be different if they’d never gone to the island, if she’d just stayed on the beach with Clarissa and Nona and let them make fun of her until they were all too drunk to care and the conversation devolved into late-night talk. If all of them had just stretched out on blankets, not looking at each other, just watching the fog creep up towards the stars and telling the kind of small truths that are too fundamental to say any other way. If Alex had said: _I know it was my fault._ If Nona had said: _You two are so stupid_. If Clarissa had said — but it doesn’t matter, because they didn’t, and because Alex doesn’t get angry. She just wonders, sometimes, if she would feel less like a character in the wrong story, like she missed the turnoff five miles back and now it’s just endless highway.

The girl who isn’t Clarissa orders a drink that Clarissa would never get, anyway, all whipped cream and blended ice. Now that Alex is watching, her laugh is wrong too, her walk, everything about her. It could never be Clarissa, because she’s gone and Alex is the only one who remembers her, but that means there’s a space in her head where Clarissa should be, an absence that only she feels. Despite her best efforts, Alex still lives in a world where Clarissa was, once, and then stopped being forever.

She clicks through to the next page. When she looks up again, the girl is gone. Alex closes her laptop, drains her fourth coffee, and starts thinking about lunch.

 

* * *

 

Because it’s summer, Alex doesn’t sleep well, and because of the heat she wakes up a few times throughout the night, and every time she falls back asleep she has to forge through late-July dreams before she actually gets some rest. She has a big fan instead of an air conditioner, and sleeps in a shirt and her underwear on top of the sheets, and somewhere in the distance she can hear sirens, and at first she thinks that she’s awake but something is off, something sounds wrong. Her fan is too loud. It sounds like it’s echoing in an empty space, and Alex doesn’t have a lot of furniture but her room isn’t that big. The sirens sound wrong, too, like a klaxon out of an old movie.

Alex knows that she walked home and ate takeout straight out of the fridge and stared at the wall until she ended up, somehow, here. She knows that it’s a dream because there’s a step missing, and it doesn’t bother her, but it also doesn’t bother Alex that there are two points of light glowing red behind her curtains, and it should. She knows it should. She sits up, or ends up sitting, and swings her legs over the edge of the bed, which isn’t hers. It’s an iron bunk, like the kind they have in hospitals and county jails and boarding schools with bars on the windows, and the floor is cold metal. When she looks up again, the curtains are gone, but Clarissa isn’t.

Because it’s a dream, Alex knows where she is, but she also knows that in ten minutes she’ll either wake up or fall into a deeper dreamless sleep. One way or another, she won’t be on the U.S.S. Kanaloa for much longer. “Okay,” she says, because it makes her brave and stupid, and because she prefers seeing Clarissa in her sleep to seeing her while she’s awake. “What do you want?”

All she can see of Clarissa is red eyes, still, until the world goes wrong and suddenly Clarissa is right in front of her. She doesn’t walk, because her feet don’t touch the floor; she just happens, like a movie on fast-forward, like a glitch correcting itself. “You don’t remember,” Clarissa says in her multitude of voices. Something is wrong with her spine. Alex remembers the way Clarissa fell, the dull awful thud when she hit the stairs however many stories down and the stain, the dark spatter that only she noticed, already soaking into the dust after they raced down the stairs. _Nobody could just walk away from that, right?_ No, but it was better than the alternative, wasn’t it? It was better than seeing what a fall like that did to a body.

“Don’t remember what?” Alex says. “You? Believe me, I wish I didn’t.”

“Us,” Clarissa says, one voice at a time. “You don’t. Recall. What we asked.”

Alex frowns. “What? Okay, fine. What _did_ you ask?”

Clarissa shakes her head, at the wrong angle, like her neck is out of joint. For all Alex knows, it is. “No. Cheating.”

“Forget this,” Alex says, and she goes to lie back down, but then Clarissa is there, right above her in the dark, eyes like hazard lights. “Jesus! You’re not real. I won’t even remember this tomorrow.”

“No,” Clarissa agrees. “You won’t. Remember.” She reaches out, and Alex can’t help flinching away, but all Clarissa does is press her finger to Alex’s mouth for a moment. Her skin is dry and cool, and Alex stays very still, even after Clarissa lifts her hand. “Shh,” she says in all her voices at once, and it sounds like the tide coming in, the crash of wave after wave on the shore. “Shh. Again,” she says, “one year in. Every ten.”

The lanterns of Clarissa’s eyes, like some dreadful deep-sea fish, the salt and rust that Alex can taste in the air, the cadence of her voice like Morse code from a long-dead transmitter: Alex is suddenly desperately sad, both that she doesn’t understand and that she doesn’t know how to try. The two of them are stranded on opposite sides of an unbridgeable chasm with only the rattle of each other’s radio static for company, and all Alex can do is lie there and meet Clarissa’s deadlight stare, untold fathoms bearing down on them both.

Alex wakes blinking spots from her eyes, one leg hanging over the side of the bed. The sunlight shines through her curtains like a memory of summers past, warm and gold and unreal. When she sits up, the room remains exactly as it is.

 

* * *

 

She still talks to Ren, more often than Jonas, although that isn’t saying much. Alex gets the sense that he saves most of his time and energy for Nona, although she isn’t exactly sure what’s going on with them, not after Nona took a gap year in the middle of college to travel with some touring production. Ren had gone a little stir-crazy, since he couldn’t actually follow her around the continental states, and it had been the most Alex had heard from him in years. It was nice to know that he was doing okay, although it hadn’t lasted; when Nona settled in a consistent time zone again, his messages had become less frequent and eventually tailed off. Alex can’t blame him, after that last summer. She hadn’t exactly been in the place. She hadn’t exactly been the best friend. The last time they’d talked, in March, she had offered to buy him dinner the next time he ended up in the city. He and Nona were looking at apartments in Boston, though both had declined to specify whether they were doing so as a collective noun. _Sure,_ he said, and never got back to her with a date.

Still, when Alex takes a minute away from trawling job listings and internship boards, there’s a notification from him on her phone. _Hey, sorry I kind of fell through on this one. What’s up? How’re you doing?_

She stares at it for a while, starts typing and stops and then clears it all. Hopefully Ren isn’t still looking at his phone. The right reply would be something along the lines of _not much_ and _I’m doing fine._ Ren has his own shit to deal with and he means it as a courtesy, an olive branch, not an actual question. He doesn’t need to know whether Alex is actually doing okay or not.

Alex just can’t bring herself to lie, is the problem. She isn’t doing badly, honestly. She just — isn’t doing. That’s the real problem, not the lying, but the faulty premise. Ren probably thinks she has her life together, with an apartment in the city and roommates she doesn’t hate, and by those standards Alex is doing great. By any kind of standard that involves doing more than going through the motions, she doesn’t even qualify to answer the question.

She’s occupying a different coffeeshop today, one with the air conditioning turned up a little too high. Alex stares at the text for a little while longer, and then turns her phone over so that she doesn’t have to think about it, and then she turns her phone back over and deletes the entire conversation. It seems like the kind of thing she should regret instantly, but instead she feels better, lighter. She tells herself that she’ll text Ren later, and knows it’s a lie.

The thing about Jonas is that Alex doesn’t have to text him to know he’s all right. They aren’t siblings like that, where they live in each other’s pockets all the time. Instead, they run into each other on Facebook — Jonas tagged in a photo at freshman orientation, sharing a list of things you only get if you’re a _real_ 90s kid, infecting her timeline with Cracked.com links — the way they might bump into each other in the hallways at school. Jonas likes her infrequent posts, like a tip of the head. It’s good to know that he’s doing okay. They don’t have to talk about it.

Alex sends him a link to a video of “BEST TUBA FAILS!!!” while she’s at it, and then goes back to what she does best: sending emails without expecting any replies, and not getting them.

That night, she dreams that she’s back on Edwards Island in the cave, back where it all started. Instead of a triangle hanging at the apex of the shadows, Clarissa is there, and she looks worse. She looks stretched, like a giant pinned her down with a thumb on her chest and pulled her by the ankles and wrists until her bones lengthened.

Alex knows that Clarissa won’t say anything until she does, and because it’s a dream she remembers what she wants to know, what she forgot to ask last time. “What do I need to remember?” she says.

“Do I?” Clarissa says, and this time some of the voices are whispering, unless it’s the sound of waves on the beach. “Terrify.”

“That isn’t a question,” Alex says, but something about it almost catches, like she should know what Clarissa is talking about. She answers it anyway, as best she can. “No.”

“You’re there.” Clarissa tilts her head like a dog, if it had a broken neck. “And I’m. Here.” Suddenly, she’s in front of Alex, right there. Alex tries to take a step back and her feet go out from under her. She barely catches herself before her head cracks against the stone. “Truth or slap,” Clarissa says, and this time it’s just her voice, so familiar even after years of forgetting that it takes Alex a second to answer. “Do you remember?”

“I don’t know,” Alex says, because she thinks she does, but Clarissa doesn’t seem to agree. “Do I remember what?”

“Is that your question?” Clarissa says. Some of the whisper is creeping back into her voice, around the vowels, where Alex can barely tell it’s happening.

Alex reconsiders. “No,” she says, and decides to take another shot at getting an actual answer. “What do you want?”

Clarissa frowns, though that isn’t quite the word for what she does. It isn’t Clarissa’s frown, at least not the way Alex remembers it, because she frowned all the time except when Michael was around. When Clarissa was unhappy in life, she would furrow her brow as if she was trying to think her way out of it. Clarissa in the cave frowns as if she knows how it works in theory, but has no idea how to make it work in practice. The corners of her mouth pull downwards like in a cartoon.

Alex can see something dark shining along the seam of Clarissa’s lips, crusted where she always used to bite them. She tries not to look too closely.

“You’re alive,” Clarissa says. It isn’t a question. Alex nods anyway. “You get. To be alive.” She leans in like a curious child. Alex looks for her reflection in Clarissa’s eyes, and sees only red. “I want a taste,” Clarissa says, in her own voice, and Alex is too lost to look away.

When Clarissa kisses her, or maybe it’s Alex who leans in first — it’s hard to tell, because it’s a dream, and so it just happens — she tastes blood. At first she thinks that she must have bitten her lip, but then Clarissa slips her tongue into Alex’s mouth and she realizes that Clarissa’s mouth is full of it, warm iron and salt, and that it’s getting everywhere, dripping down her chin and onto Alex’s throat and smearing across her lips.

Alex thinks that she’ll drown in it. She tries to pull away so that she can spit, or at least let it run out of her mouth, but Clarissa holds her still with too-long fingers wrapped all the way around her neck, and Alex’s mouth fills until she can feel blood spilling from the corners of her mouth, bubbling in her nose. Alex looks into Clarissa’s eyes, and all she can see and taste is red. She can feel it streaming from her nostrils, rattling in the back of her throat.

When she swallows, choking it down, Clarissa smiles. Her teeth are slick with red. “My turn,” she says, and everything about her is wrong: her eyes, her hands, the press of her tongue at the back of Alex’s mouth, the way she licks at the back of Alex’s throat and pulls back right before Alex gags, almost gentle.

Alex shouldn’t be able to dream any of it. She doesn’t know what it feels like to have someone’s hands around her throat, shouldn’t be able to imagine Clarissa’s too-thin fingers and too-long tongue, but when Clarissa leans back in to make sure she hasn’t missed anything Alex gets her hands into Clarissa’s hair and kisses back.

This time, Clarissa tightens her grip enough for Alex to feel the pressure where the tip of her tongue is lodged in Alex’s throat alongside her pulse, just far enough that Alex can’t manage a full breath, starts to get lightheaded.

When Clarissa pulls back, Alex wakes up gasping with her legs tangled in the sheets, so aroused that it takes her a moment to realize that she isn’t dreaming anymore. Her underwear is a mess like it hasn’t been since high school, and Alex has to fuck herself with three fingers before she feels like she’s getting anywhere, as if she’s already come once. For all she knows, she has.

It takes longer for Alex to get off than she would like, but finally she manages. She bangs her elbow on the bed frame and her knee on the wall and has to shove her fist into her mouth to keep quiet. It’s really good, actually, in a way that Alex didn’t think she could have anymore, somewhere between the shameless instinctual pleasure of finding out what she liked as a teenager and the conscious refinement of that as an adult.

When she falls back asleep, she doesn’t dream of anything at all.

 

* * *

 

Alex wakes up. Alex goes out. Alex sleepwalks through the day, drinks coffee, sends out emails, eats lunch, finds another coffeeshop in the afternoon, except when she doesn’t and comes home early and watches the sun sink by degrees. She keeps the air conditioning turned up high, because that way she falls asleep more quickly.

Sometimes she dreams. More often, she simply wakes and sleeps, like somebody napping on the train and jerking to consciousness at every stop.

Once, Clarissa is herself, only a little red in her eyes to indicate that they aren’t quite alone. She offers Alex a cigarette and a coffee, and they don’t talk at all.

Once, Alex is the one standing in the window frame, and Clarissa just watches as she pitches backwards. The world spins around her, and Alex slams into her mattress like an electric shock, and she stares at the ceiling until dawn.

Once, Clarissa isn’t there at all, and Alex runs the length and breadth of Edwards Island looking for her. Finally she knows what she has to do, and she goes out to the beach and she walks into the surf, and when it closes over her head she keeps walking but she doesn’t drown, she just keeps going, mile after mile of seabed and silt, and when Alex wakes she has to remind herself of where she is.

She tries to figure out, often, what Clarissa wants her to remember. She reads through what she remembers of Clarissa’s favorite books, tries to figure out where Clarissa would go and what she would do, and somewhere in between she realizes that there isn’t any point, because she has no idea. She never did, and she never will. All she has is questions, with no idea who to ask for the answers if they even exist.

Alex wonders whether Clarissa meant for her to spend the rest of her life wondering, trying to lead two lives at once: the one she has, and the one Clarissa wanted so badly to start. Maybe it’s her revenge, her way of leaving some kind of impression after all in the only way she can, the only corner of the world that hasn’t self-corrected to wipe her from existence.

She falls asleep on the sofa under a pile of secondhand books and dreams of static, cathode ray tube fuzz that warps at the top and bottom of the screen, and only stumbles to bed when her roommate starts making warning noises with pots and pans.

Alex tosses and turns for what feels like hours, and when she finally goes under she finds herself on the beach. The fire is crackling and there are blankets laid out for all of them, but Alex is the only one there, and she lies down under the stars and watches the fog come up and wonders if she’ll ever find a way off Edwards Island.

“Was it worth it?” Clarissa says, next to her, and Alex doesn’t look over.

“Yes,” she says, because it was. Because she was a kid, a scared kid who didn’t know what to do, and the only thing Alex had been sure about was that she didn’t want anybody else to die because of her, not if she could help it. Because Clarissa would have done the same thing. Because she doesn’t know what else to say. “Sorry.”

Clarissa laughs. It isn’t a pleasant sound, but it’s her, the way she used to laugh when Alex told her about the time Michael tried to give himself a haircut with their dad’s electric razor, the way she laughed when Alex accidentally hit herself in the face with her locker door. “What do you have to be sorry for?” she says. “I don’t blame you. I’d have taken any excuse to wipe me out of existence if I were you.”

“Yeah,” Alex says, because she hasn’t learned much in the years since, but she also hasn’t gotten any nicer. “That’s why I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” Clarissa says. It’s still her voice, but Alex can see the way her eyes glow when she props herself up on one elbow. “Harsh but fair. Did you figure it out yet?”

Alex rolls onto her side. “No,” she says. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Seriously, give me a clue here.”

Clarissa shakes her head. It almost looks human. “Nuh-uh,” she says. “What about another game?”

“If you want an excuse to slap me, just do it,” Alex says.

“What do _you_ want?” Clarissa says.

Alex thinks she can hear her own voice in the many that come from Clarissa’s mouth. She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“One last chance.” Clarissa taps her fingers on the towel. “Ten—”

“Don’t go,” Alex says, in a rush. “Just — don’t go, okay? This time.”

“You’re the only one who remembers,” Clarissa says. “I couldn’t go if I tried.”

Her voice is fading in and out like static, but when Alex kisses her this time the noise that Clarissa makes is all her, half scorn and half surprise. It’s easier to tell up close that her entire body is put together wrong, like somebody trying to draw a skeleton with their eyes closed, but Clarissa is strong enough to shove Alex onto her back and keep her there. When Alex tries to sit up, the beach glitches and suddenly she’s lying flat again. Her head swims.

  
“Don’t make me,” Clarissa says, voice echoing now. “Again.”

Alex doesn’t.

Clarissa’s fingers are distorted and cold and they bend in the wrong places, but she makes Alex shiver with them anyway, tracing idle lines across her belly and up her sides. When Clarissa slips one hand into Alex’s bra, her fingertips dig into Alex’s skin as if the bones beneath are too close to the surface, and she leaves bloodless marks where she presses. She finds out what makes Alex gasp — the pinch of nails — and what makes her arch, even though the world shifts around her every time she does, and she watches greedily with those awful red eyes the whole time.

Alex tries to squirm away when Clarissa undoes her fly, only partly out of instinct, but when the world resolves itself Clarissa’s face is inches from hers. Alex looks into her angler-fish eyes and thinks about kissing Clarissa, being in the grip of something alien and terrifying and powerful enough to wipe her from existence if it wanted, and then she thinks about shoving three fingers into herself and still wanting more, and on a level below instinct she knows that it’s this.

She lets her head fall back, so she doesn’t see Clarissa move, but Alex feels it when she slides the flat of her palm between Alex’s legs, smears wetness halfway up to her navel and barely tucks the tips of her fingers into her, just enough for Alex to want more.

Some of Clarissa’s fingers are broken, Alex is pretty sure, because they aren’t meant to bend like that. They aren’t meant to push at her, inside her, the way they do, but it makes her moan out loud anyway.

Clarissa isn’t gentle, which is good, because Alex doesn’t want gentle. She wants to know what it’s like to be full, to be a vessel for somebody else’s desire and somebody else’s anger, and Clarissa fucks her as if she wants to see whether she can break Alex by accident. It’s unsustainable, both of them pushing for the same outcome, but when Alex comes, Clarissa doesn’t stop. The world glitches, shaking Alex out of herself for a moment, and when she resolves into her body again Clarissa grins at her — half puppetry, half genuine — and slides her tongue in alongside her fingers.

After that, it’s hard for Alex to say what happens, because her thoughts empty out. She knows that Clarissa never looks away, and that at some point she comes again, and at some point after that she starts to drift, aware that her body is shaking uncontrollably and equally aware that it has very little to do with her. Clarissa has a new toy, and she wants to see what it can do, what it can take. Alex is all too happy to let her play. It seems like the least she can do.

At some point, somebody starts making noises, awful wrenched-out juddering sounds. It isn’t Clarissa.

She has no idea how much time passes before Clarissa gets bored, but when Alex comes back to herself her entire body is aching, so wrung out that when she tries to sit up her elbows give out.

Clarissa props her up like a doll, and after a second Alex remembers how to breathe. The soreness is beginning to bleed through now, the kind of pain that Alex knows will overwhelm her as soon as she starts to feel it properly. She feels more alive than she has in years.

“We don’t get to keep you,” Clarissa says, oddly wistful. “Neither do I.”

“What was I supposed to remember?” Alex says, because she doesn’t think she has much time before she wakes up. She can already feel herself slipping away, back to daylight and a world that feels much less real. “What did you want me to know?”

“What did I say,” Clarissa says. “What did I ask?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Alex says. Edwards Island is already fading around her. “I don’t know, okay! You never asked me anything! You just thought whatever you wanted, and most of the time you were right, and you never asked for my opinion or my approval or, I don’t know, whatever. So unless you want to tell me, we’re kind of stuck.”

Clarissa leans forward, and with all of her voices, she whispers it in Alex’s ear.

 

* * *

 

Alex drifts awake with a thought at the corner of her eye, something she knows she’ll forget as soon as she wakes up properly; the afterimage of a dead star, the dying light of a blown-out bulb.

She remembers most of the dream, at least the parts that she was present for; she remembers what Clarissa said. She remembers the way Clarissa looked, at the end, more like herself than Alex had seen her in years, even before Edwards Island. Clarissa as she was, Clarissa as she is, Clarissa as she never got to be, standing in a coffeeshop and flicking her hair out of her face and ordering the kind of drink she hated in high school and never got to try in college.

Alex knows that when she goes to shower, she’ll find bruises on her hips, her ribs, pressed into her breasts and shoulders. She knows that she’ll ache.

She still doesn’t know if there’s a word for what Clarissa is, but Alex knows that she isn’t lost, not as long as she remembers, not as long as Alex keeps picking up that years-dead signal from an island that she’ll never leave.

Clarissa might not get to keep her now, but Alex thinks that one day she will. One day Alex will find her way back to Edwards Island, not as it is but as she knew it, humming with a resonance that Alex knows she’ll never shake, and the lights will come down on the world that only they live in, where Clarissa once was and then ceased to have been. She and Clarissa and the ghosts will all be left in the dark together, like words in a closed book, a glitch correcting itself.

It doesn’t scare her, Alex realizes. It should, but instead it just feels right. She made a choice, and she’ll live with the consequences, and one day — not soon — she’ll be herself again, as she was, as she wants to remember it.

Until then, the future will keep happening. Alex doesn’t think it’ll be any better, but she suspects Clarissa isn’t the type to let someone go so easily. She has a feeling she won’t be alone in her dreams for a long, long time.

Alex turns away from the wall — the same, identical woman that she always has been, withdrawn and aimless and only slightly less lost than usual — and goes to face another day.


End file.
